In the last week I attended a conference of ‘Future Leaders of Nigeria’, and one of the facilitators made a very interesting statement, “Politicians do not value the number of followers you have on Twitter, they value the number of people you can bring to the table when it matters.” That proposition was proved beyond […]
Guest Post by Patrick Gathara At the end of my first term in high school, I watched a screening of Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist, the tale of an ordinary family unknowingly living in a house built over a graveyard without the bother of moving the bodies. Of course, this does not go down well with the […]
Guest Post by Mukoma Wa Ngugi In 1982, as the air force-led coup attempt in Kenya unfolded, we sat glued to our transistor radio listening to the BBC and Voice of America (VOA). In fact, the more the oppressive the Moi regime censored Kenyan media, the more Western media became the lifeline through which we learned […]
The Kenyan people have voted. The Kenyan elections have come and not quite gone. The foreign press offered its readers a veritable smorgasbord of dreadfully decontextualized representations, and now that the actual polling has passed, you can just about taste the collective disappointment at the absence of spectacular violence. As the local Kenyan press noted, […]
Kenyans vote today (in some places voting have already started). And somehow, as in any election in any African country, the cliches are not far behind. “Will Kenya fall into mayhem after the results of the general elections are announced?” “Will one of (East) Africa’s most politically stable countries see a return of post-election violence […]
Kenya had its first ever televised presidential debate on Monday night. Like many others I was watching the livestream online and Tweeting while at it. I have included some of my real time tweets in this post (see below). A number of things stood out during the debate. The incumbent Prime Minister Raila Odinga—referred to […]
A few days ago the BBC reported on Zimbabwe’s impending elections, amidst concerns of renewed violence and human rights abuses in the country. However, what is often lost in the sensationalization of political violence, by this and other news articles is the revolutionary impact that non-violent actions can have in transforming a national political landscape. […]
Ghana held its sixth consecutive elections since its democratic transition in 1992 this past weekend and once again has earned its reputation as a stable and thriving democracy, in spite of predictable cries of fraud by the losers, the New Patriotic Party (NPP). As I predicted here before the elections, Ghanaians elected the incumbent president John Dramani […]
The critically-acclaimed documentary “An African Election” is an excellent primer for Friday’s elections in the small, but pivotal West African nation of Ghana. Directed by Jarreth Merz, the film chronicles the final month of campaigning in Ghana’s December 2008 presidential elections which led to a hotly-contested nation-wide run-off later that month, followed by a cliff-hanger […]
We know journalists will soon begin to obsess over what is the legacy of Mwai Kibaki, Kenya’s 3rd President since Independence. Kibaki has to stand down next March (when elections are scheduled in Kenya) after two terms in charge (including a disputed December 2007 re-election). It’s hard to make sense of the politics around Kibaki’s […]
